Guess? - Earnings Call - Q1 2026

Executive Summary

• Q1 FY26 revenue rose 9% to $647.8M, a constant-currency +12%, driven primarily by rag & bone integration and stronger wholesale shipments; adjusted diluted loss per share was $0.44 and GAAP diluted loss per share was $0.65, both ahead of internal expectations.
• Both revenue and adjusted EPS beat Wall Street consensus: revenue $647.8M vs $631.4M estimate*, and adjusted EPS -$0.44 vs -$0.69 estimate*; gross margin compressed 200 bps to 39.9% on mix shift to wholesale and lower royalties.
• Full-year FY26 guidance updated: revenue growth raised to +5.5%–+7.4% (from +3.9%–+6.2%), but GAAP EPS cut to $0.87–$1.11 (from $1.03–$1.37) and adjusted EPS narrowed to $1.32–$1.64 (from $1.32–$1.76); adjusted operating margin guided to 4.4%–5.1%.
• Management highlighted tariff mitigation (expected FY26 impact < $10M) and retail productivity/marketing initiatives as key levers; Americas retail sequentially improved late in the quarter, while Asia (Greater China) remains a headwind.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Wholesale outperformance: Americas Wholesale +63% (+70% cc) and Europe wholesale “mid-teens” growth, supported by proactive inventory flows to offset Red Sea disruptions.
• Rag & bone exceeded expectations across wholesale and DTC; management targets ~$320M+ FY26 revenue with store openings and new licensing categories (handbags performing well; watches, fragrances, eyewear in pipeline).
• Americas Retail showed sequential improvement late in Q1 with conversion up and women’s apparel +3%; management sees pricing and assortment changes driving further gains.

What Went Wrong

• Gross margin pressure (-200 bps YoY to 39.9%) primarily from mix (lower royalties, higher wholesale share) and modest promo headwinds; SG&A rate increased 80 bps to 44% on rag & bone consolidation and JV conversion.
• Asia weakness intensified: revenues -20% (cc -16%), comps -24% (cc -20%); Greater China restructuring to stem ~$20M annual loss, with pursuit of a local partner.
• DTC softness persisted: Europe retail comps -4% (cc -3%) and Americas retail comps -11% (cc -9%); Americas Retail adjusted operating margin fell to -10.5% on deleverage and markdowns.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Guess? 1st quarter fiscal 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To participate, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, simply press star 11 again. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Fabrice Benarouche, Senior Vice President of Finance, Investor Relations, and Chief Accounting Officer. Please proceed.

Fabrice Benarouche (Senior VP of Finance, Investor Relations, and Chief Accounting Officer)

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. On the call today with me are Carlos Alberini, Chief Executive Officer; Denis Secor, Interim Chief Financial Officer; and Alberto Toni, our incoming Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, the company will be making forward-looking statements, including comments regarding future plans, strategic initiatives, capital allocation, and short- and long-term outlooks. The company's actual results may differ materially from current expectations based on risk factors included in today's press release and the company's quarterly and annual reports filed with the SEC. Comments will also reference certain GAAP or adjusted measures. GAAP reconciliations and descriptions of these measures can be found in today's earnings release. Now, I will turn it over to Carlos.

Carlos Alberini (CEO)

Thank you, Fabrice, and thank you all for joining us for our Q1 fiscal 2026 quarterly conference call. We are pleased to report our Q1 operating results that came in ahead of expectations across key financial metrics, reflecting the successful integration of rag & bone and continued momentum in our Guess? wholesale businesses across Europe and the Americas. Disciplined expense management, combined with a better-than-expected top line, enabled us to report operating results ahead of our guidance range, narrowing our loss for the quarter. In the period, we grew our business in U.S. dollars by 9%, despite a currency headwind that consumed about two and 1/2% points of growth. The majority of that growth came from the acquisition of rag & bone, which added 9 percentage points to our top line constant currency growth, reflecting a full quarter of ownership this year versus just one month in the prior year period.

Our core Guess? business also contributed, adding about three points of constant currency growth, driven by higher shipments in our wholesale operations across Europe and the Americas. This gain more than offsets softer results in Asia and in our Americas retail channel. Licensing revenue declined versus the prior year, creating a modest headwind in the period. For Guess?, our European wholesale business was the largest contributor of this growth, posting a mid-teen growth rate in the quarter. Our products continue to perform well among our wholesale partners in that region, and we believe that we are being rewarded for ensuring reliable product deliveries despite some of the recent supply chain challenges. We shared on our last call that we are mitigating the supply chain risk caused by the Red Sea crisis by bringing in products early. We are not buying more; we are buying earlier.

This near-term working capital investment bore fruit during the quarter, protecting our partners and our businesses as we were able to ship larger volumes than we had anticipated for the quarter, mainly driven by the availability of the product. In our European retail stores, revenues came in slightly below our expectations, posting a constant currency comp decrease of 4% as a decline in store traffic more than offset improved conversion, improved AUR, and better units per transaction. In the Americas wholesale business, the Guess? brand delivered double-digit top line growth, surpassing our expectations for the quarter. Similar to Europe, we were also able to deliver more product earlier to our partners than what we had planned. For the year, we expect this business to grow modestly. In the Americas retail business, our performance improved in the latter part of the quarter and exceeded our expectations.

While traffic headwinds remained our key productivity challenge, we were able to offset some of that with improved conversion. As a result, we closed the period with a net 10% constant currency comp sales decline for the quarter. Our business in Asia continues to face headwinds and fell short of our expectations this quarter, with revenues declining by over 20%, with significant weakness in the Greater China market. Consistent with what we shared with you on our last call, we are continuing to look for a partner to take on our business in this market, and we have been contracting our operations here, including headcount reductions, store closings, and ceasing to purchase product for future seasons. Sales declined in most of our Asian businesses, and store traffic remains the key driver of the comp sales decline in our stores there.

Finally, in our licensing business, royalties declined slightly more than we had planned. Royalties declined in fragrances and footwear, while handbags' royalties grew. Moving next to our product performance, results varied by region and category throughout the quarter. In Europe, women's apparel sales increased, driven by strong performance in activewear and sweaters. In accessories, fragrances and watches delivered positive comps. In the Americas, the business was negative across most categories, with women's activewear and watches performing well. Turning to rag & bone, the business significantly outperformed our expectations for the quarter, driven primarily by strong wholesale shipments. rag & bone's performance in the retail stores and online also outperformed our expectations. Paul has been working hard with many of our licensee partners to add new product categories into our rag & bone assortment. As we shared before, we already signed a new handbag license, and that business is doing well.

We also have new license deals at various stages of completion in watches, fragrances, and eyewear, and we are excited about the prospects for those categories in the future. Moving now to the rest of the P&L, we delivered total company gross margin of 39.9%, 200 basis points lower than last year, and also below our expectations going into the quarter. About 70% of that change was driven by business mix, mainly lower royalty income and a higher contribution from wholesale, which naturally carries lower product margins. There was a modest headwind due to increased promotional activity, and that amount was fully offset by improvements in initial merchandise margins. Currencies were also a modest headwind to our margins during the period. Total company SG&A increased 11% year over year, with the integration of rag & bone driving the majority of that increase.

In the quarter, we reported an adjusted operating loss of $26 million and an adjusted operating loss margin of 4%, both of which represented improvements over our expectations for the quarter. We delivered an adjusted loss per share of $0.44, also an improvement over our expectations. Before I update you on our strategic initiatives, let me spend a few moments discussing tariffs and how we believe they may impact our business and our outlook. On last quarter's call, in our discussion of tariffs, we shared a few important aspects of our business. 1st, roughly 75% of our business is done outside of the U.S. and therefore not directly impacted by the tariffs. Second, the remaining 25% of directly produced and distributed products represents roughly $200 million in annual purchases.

Both our Guess? and rag & bone sourcing teams have undertaken a massive effort to move a substantial amount of our production out of China to other markets. We also reworked costs with vendors and pricing with retail customers. As a result of these efforts, we expect that the year-over-year impact of tariffs on our margins this year will be less than $10 million. We have achieved that with very minimal price increases. That $10 million is fully incorporated in the outlook that we are providing today. That is the cost impact to our P&L based on what we know today. The tariffs have also sparked renewed fears of inflation or recession, but we have not attempted to predict how they may affect the consumer's appetite to spend their disposable income.

Now, I would like to turn to our strategic direction and provide an update on several key initiatives underway across the business. On our last call, I outlined the key strategic initiatives that our teams are driving to grow our business, strengthen our organization, improve brand awareness and customer engagement to increase retail productivity, build a more efficient infrastructure, and optimize our business model to improve profitability and return on invested capital. Today, I will walk you through the progress that we are making against some of these priorities, starting with one of our most immediate focus areas: retail productivity. One of the key challenges for our business over the last several years has been the decline in customer traffic into our stores and to our websites.

Those trends have persisted in the U.S. and Asia for some time, and we are now seeing similar patterns emerge in our European retail business. To address this, we are rolling out a range of initiatives aimed at re-engaging customers and driving higher traffic across both physical and digital channels. We continue to see a significant opportunity to increase brand awareness and customer engagement through increased marketing investment. We are in the middle of a project working with General Idea, which is a consulting firm, to craft a new market vision to transform our social media strategy that we believe will reignite our brand relevance and awareness with today's consumer. Nicolay Marciano is our internal lead for this project.

We are beginning with the implementation of several initiatives as we speak, including the reorganization of our teams, the deployment of new practices, and increased investment into social channels and relationships with influencers and other collaborations to attract a younger audience. In addition, we recently launched a customer loyalty program in Europe, thus far in just two markets, Italy and Poland, and the learnings and results from this implementation have been very, very positive. In those markets, among our loyalty customers, we saw increases in revenues from those customers of roughly 36%. We also saw that those customers returned to the stores with greater frequency, and they spent more per visit. Our plan is now to roll this program out to more countries in the region, starting next with Germany, Austria, and Spain, with additional markets to come online later in the year.

As we continue to sign up more customers into our database and we gain insights into their shopping habits, we are investing in improving our customer insights capabilities using AI-powered tools. Next, there is an opportunity in how we buy. Over the past several years, we have been very successful in driving IMU improvements across our apparel lines. In order to drive production costs down, it necessitated a larger and earlier commitment of our production volumes, therefore leaving less open to buy later in the year. Undoubtedly, that resulted in missing certain trends, sacrificing a level of revenues for the extra IMU points. We think there is an opportunity to better balance that going forward. Our team is developing fast-track capabilities within our supply chain to more quickly replenish bestsellers and inject additional product into the market as trends develop in the season.

We used to operate in this manner several years ago and had success, primarily in North America. We are implementing this again with our Spring/Summer 2026 collection, with our goal ultimately to leave 50% of our buy open after we place our initial orders. We are also looking closely at pricing. Over the past several years, we implemented a strategy to elevate our brand and raise the perception of our brand among consumers. That initiative was anchored in building more quality into our products, including better fabrications, better make, and better embellishments. While the program was successful in many ways, our recent analysis of pricing suggests that some of our legacy customers were not able to make that journey with us. It is also reflective of what we have experienced with today's consumer, who tends to be quite sensitive to pricing.

Our plan now is to rebalance our product assortment to increase our penetration and offering of opening price point products. Finally, we think our existing clustering model is too rigid, not addressing the unique dynamics of individual stores, not leaving store management with enough flexibility to assort stores based on the unique dynamics of their particular store. One store may attract a more casual customer, while another may appeal to one that is looking for a more dressy outfit. Weather patterns may be different as well, necessitating a different assortment based on seasonality. Our new model will create that greater flexibility to allow managers more autonomy to assort their stores based on the unique characteristics of that store's customer.

As part of this effort, we will also challenge the product categories to be offered in each store to optimize the product assortment and the space allocation based on expected productivity per sq ft. Visual merchandising standards will be improved as well to optimize navigation throughout the stores and ease of shopping. Improving retail productivity for us is the highest priority that we have today. Just as a point of reference, a 10% improvement in sales in our retail stores company-wide would represent roughly $140 million in incremental revenue and around $70 million in incremental operating profit. Thus far, the early reads on these initiatives have been encouraging. In both North America and Europe so far in the 2nd quarter, we have seen sequential improvements in conversion rates, with both regions posting sequential improvements in retail comps.

Another area of opportunity for us to improve profitability in our business is rationalizing our business model. Businesses are not static. They evolve and change over time. The profitability of certain channels has changed as consumer shopping behaviors have evolved. Certain categories that represented large opportunities in the past may no longer generate the returns necessary to justify the investments. Markets that were once profitable may no longer generate appropriate levels of income. We are looking at this across all different dimensions of our business to ensure that we are making and sustaining investments that deliver solid returns to our shareholders. We are examining our store portfolio, ensuring that every store serves a strategic and financial purpose to represent the brand in the marketplace and to deliver profit in that market.

We shared on our last call that in North America, we are exiting non-strategic and unprofitable full-price Guess? stores, and we are consolidating some of our infrastructure supporting that business. We expect to reduce our North America store fleet by roughly 20 stores, with some of them closing this year at their natural lease expirations. So far this year, we have closed six of these stores. We are examining unproductive businesses. Those may be regions or brands. For example, on our last call, we shared the changes that we are making in China. While we continue to believe that there is an opportunity for Guess? in the Greater China market, given the market size and our brand's high awareness, we have not been able to make that business profitable over the many years that we have operated there.

This year, we expect that business will lose roughly $20 million, and we are committed to eliminating that loss for next year. We are looking for a third-party partner to take over this business, and we have already met with several potential candidates. In the meantime, as I said before, we are continuing to operate this business so as to minimize the negative impact on our earnings. Just to remind you, we expect these two initiatives, North America stores and Greater China, will unlock over $30 million in operating profit starting with next fiscal year. There are still other dimensions of our business that we are examining. We plan to address underperforming product categories, unprofitable customer relationships, unproductive SKUs, and also plan to consolidate further products at a global level, including additional categories for our factory outlet business, which are currently developed regionally.

This is all to ensure that every aspect of our business is creating value. Finally, it is our infrastructure and its alignment to today's business. Since Guess? was founded in 1981, our business has evolved dramatically. We started as a pure wholesale denim supplier in the United States with one lone footprint here in Los Angeles that encompassed every aspect of our business. Over time, we grew our business by opening our own retail stores, both full-price and outlets. We entered new territories, adding both operating and infrastructure functions to support those businesses. We expanded globally, adding direct resources in new countries, and ultimately developed regional centers as the business grew. We added multiple new categories, some internal, some external, and stood up the necessary infrastructure to support that expansion.

We also added IT systems to support our business, and we evolved along with the consumer, adding e-commerce capabilities as the shopping habits of consumers changed over time. Today's business is far more complex across multiple dimensions and requires a more sophisticated ecosystem. We believe that we have opportunities to re-engineer those businesses to make sure that our infrastructure aligns with our business as it exists today. As an example of this, we have separate support structures that are based now in both Los Angeles and Lugano, Switzerland, one to support the North American business while the other supports our European business, performing largely the same functions. We see an opportunity to optimize these structures, creating one global center that can support both regions, taking advantage of the significant scale of our fleet and business. We believe our European support infrastructure presents a strong opportunity for consolidation and optimization.

This year, our business in Europe should reach nearly $1.7 billion in sales. It's large and complex, spanning more than 35 countries with a regional center, multiple country support centers, and several logistics centers throughout the region. As it has evolved over time, it has undoubtedly created some duplication of effort, where much of the same work that is done in the regional center is also replicated within the countries. We see an opportunity to realign these resources where strategy is developed and set from the regional center, leaving the in-country resources to manage local execution. Logistics presents an opportunity as well. In time, both in Europe and North America, we have added logistics capabilities and centers to address specific needs or opportunities at the time. Today, we have eight centers throughout Europe and another three in North America.

Within each region, there are opportunities to consolidate and optimize these networks. Another area of opportunity is our systems environment. Our IT infrastructure has evolved similarly to our business, very organically, building and adding to a network based on the business needs of that moment, with different solutions and tools in different parts of our business. We believe that there are opportunities to restructure this and re-engineer a systems network that is more uniform and standardized globally. These are just a few of the areas that we are tackling, but they reflect a broader goal: to build a unified global platform that enables us to operate as one integrated business rather than a collection of regionally siloed operations. By centralizing what makes sense and tailoring only what's necessary, we aim to support our future growth with greater agility, efficiency, and strategic alignment.

Now, let me share a few thoughts on our outlook for the remainder of this year. We have updated our outlook to reflect the relatively minor changes in business trends that we experienced in Q1. For the year, we still expect our revenue growth will be driven by owning rag & bone for a full year, solid growth from our European wholesale business, and the conversion of our Middle East business to a joint venture. We have moderated our expectation coming from our European retail stores, given our first-quarter experience, though we do expect some improvement later in the year, given our marketing and retail productivity initiatives that I just summarized. In addition, the U.S. dollar has weakened over the past two months, which should result in a stronger currency tailwind on revenues. All in, we expect full-year revenues to grow in the range of 5.5%-7.4%.

For the full year, we now expect adjusted operating margin between 4.4% and 5.1% and adjusted EPS in the range of $1.32-$1.64 a share. Dennis will share more details in just a moment. Before I turn the call over, I want to comment on our Chief Financial Officer transition. In April, we announced the appointment of Alberto Toni, a seasoned executive with more than three decades of international experience in finance and operations. His proven ability to drive performance across design-led retail and consumer-facing organizations will be instrumental as we sharpen our focus on operational efficiency, portfolio discipline, and long-term value creation for Guess?. Alberto will be based in Lugano, Switzerland, and will lead Guess?'s financial team globally. Dennis Secor, Interim CFO, will remain on board as Executive Vice President through September of 2025 to ensure a seamless leadership transition.

With a deep bench of finance leaders that includes Fabrice Benarouche, Dennis Secor, and several other talented executives, we are well-positioned to advance our strategic priorities and deliver sustainable growth. In closing, this year, we are managing through a complex environment and have made meaningful strides in advancing our operational, strategic, and financial priorities. On behalf of Paul and myself, I want to extend our appreciation to our global teams for their dedication and strong execution. As we begin fiscal year 2026, we are energized by the opportunities ahead. Our strategic focus remains on driving higher productivity across our direct-to-consumer channels and enhancing profitability through targeted business and portfolio optimization. We are firmly committed to unlocking our full potential and delivering long-term shareholder value. With that, let me welcome and pass the call to Alberto. Thanks, Carlos, and good afternoon, everyone.

Alberto Toni (CFO)

This is my first week of work at Guess?, and I'm very thrilled to join such a great organization and an amazing brand. I'm currently in Los Angeles to start a thorough handover from Dennis to secure a smooth transition. I'm looking forward to contributing to the next chapter of Guess?'s long and successful history. With that, let me turn the call over to Dennis to walk you through our results and provide additional context on our outlook.

Dennis Secor (Interim CFO)

Thank you, Alberto, and good afternoon, everyone. As Carlos shared, total company revenues increased 9% in US dollars to $648 million. In constant currency, the increase was 12%. The biggest driver of the increase was the acquisition of rag & bone, adding 9 points of constant currency growth. Last year's Rag & Bone results include revenues for just one month, April, the month of acquisition, while this year includes the full quarter.

The core Guess? business grew 3% in constant currency in the quarter, with growth in wholesale businesses both in Europe and the Americas, offsetting negative comps from our direct businesses. In Europe, we grew 8% in US dollars to $306 million. In constant currency, the growth was 9%. Retail comps, including e-com, declined 4% in US dollars and 3% in constant currency. Our wholesale business continues to perform well, with revenues increasing in the mid-teens in the quarter. As Carlos shared, we were able to ship some orders earlier than we had planned. The adjusted operating loss margin in our European business was 2.9%, 270 basis points lower than a year ago, driven primarily by the impact of the infrastructure spending and currencies. In Americas retail, revenues grew 9% in US dollars, reaching $157 million. In constant currency, the growth was 12%.

The segment's growth was driven primarily by the acquisition of rag & bone, more than offsetting the impact of negative comps in our core Guess? retail stores, as well as the impact of currencies. Comps from our U.S. and Canadian stores declined 10% in constant currency, with the trend improving in the latter part of the quarter. Including our e-com business, the constant currency comp decline was 11%. Traffic to our stores continued to be down, though some of that was offset with an improvement in conversion. Americas retail posted an adjusted operating loss margin of 10.5%, a 330 basis point decline from last year's first quarter. That margin decline was driven primarily by deleverage on the fixed cost base, given the comp declines both in-store and online, more markdowns, and higher store costs, partially offset by the addition of the rag & bone business and an increased IMU.

In Americas wholesale, revenues increased by 63% in US dollars to $101 million, driven by the addition of rag & bone, along with higher Guess? shipments in the United States and in Mexico. In constant currency, the growth rate was 70%. The increase in the United States Guess? business was primarily to our off-price accounts. Adjusted operating margin was 19.9%, 280 basis points lower than a year ago, primarily due to the impact of rag & bone's business. In Asia, revenues decreased 20% in US dollars to $58 million. In constant currency, the decline was 16%. Most of our Asian businesses declined, with the most impactful declines from South Korea and Greater China, where, as Carlos shared, we are purposefully constraining our business. Retail comps, including e-com for the region, decreased 20% in constant currency.

Our adjusted operating loss margin in Asia was 3.1%, 820 basis points lower than last year, driven mainly by the impact of the lower revenues on the expense base. Finally, our licensing segment revenues declined 14% to $25 million. As Carlos shared, we delivered total company gross margin of 39.9%, 200 basis points lower than last year, driven mainly by business mix. Adjusted SG&A expenses for the quarter increased 11% to $285 million. The most significant drivers of this change resulted from our acquisition of Rag & Bone, the conversion of our Middle East business to a joint venture, partially offset by the favorable impact of currencies on our expense base. For the quarter, the SG&A rate increased 80 basis points to 44%.

In the quarter, our adjusted operating loss totaled $26 million, and with a lower gross margin and higher SG&A rate, our adjusted operating margin declined 270 basis points to negative 4%. In the quarter, we recorded an adjusted effective tax rate of 18.1%, lower than what we expect for the full year. In the first quarter, we recorded $6 million in adjusted net non-operating income, primarily resulting from revaluation of certain of our foreign subsidiaries' net assets and liabilities into US dollars. Our adjusted Q1 diluted loss per share was $0.44, compared to an adjusted Q1 loss per share last year of $0.27. Moving now to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with $638 million of inventory, up 15% in US dollars and 14% in constant currency compared to last year's Q1.

About three quarters of that increase is in Europe, where we've accelerated product deliveries to mitigate against potential disruptions given the Red Sea crisis and to support our growing business. That increase represents roughly five weeks of Europe's supply, where, as Carlos said, they're not buying more, just earlier. Our goal is that once that situation is resolved, we can begin to reduce that working capital investment. The balance of the inventory growth is split roughly evenly between the Americas and Asia. Our receivables were $331 million, an 11% increase in both US and constant dollars compared to last year's Q1. This increase supports our growing wholesale business both in Europe and the Americas. For the 1st quarter, capital expenditures were $22 million, mainly driven by investments in store remodels, new stores, and technology. This compares to $21 million last year.

We ended the quarter with $151 million in cash compared to $242 million a year ago. The most significant drivers of that $91 million cash consumption over the last four quarters include $70 million in dividends and minority interest distributions, $50 million in share repurchases from July of last year, and $21 million in free cash flow consumption, partially offset by $38 million of net borrowings and $40 million related to the gross proceeds from the sale of our US distribution facility. We ended the first quarter with just under $350 million of borrowing capacity on our various global facilities, so roughly half a billion dollars of available liquidity. We also announced today that our board has approved our regular quarterly cash dividend of $0.30 per share. Moving now to our outlook.

Carlos just shared the key drivers of our business for this year, and we've experienced only relatively modest changes to our expected business trends thus far. Therefore, we are making only minor adjustments to our outlook for the year. Moving positively, Americas retail exceeded our Q1 expectations, as did our European wholesale business, though some of that is just a shift between the first and second quarters. Trending lower than our expectations are our European retail stores and our Asia business. We've also revised Americas wholesale as one of our customers there has ceased operations, and we've made a modest adjustment to the phasing of our Middle East joint venture. We've also adjusted our outlook to the current currency environment, which is markedly different from a prior outlook. That will now more favorably impact both revenues and operating profit. We've been able to reduce some anticipated spending.

As Carlos shared, we have updated our full year outlook for revenue growth between 5.5% and 7.4%, adjusted operating margin between 4.4% and 5.1%, and adjusted EPS between $1.32 and $1.64. Again, this outlook fully absorbs the anticipated impact of tariffs based on what we know today. For the second quarter, we expect US dollar revenues to grow between 2.9% and 4.7%. Now, let me give you some extra color to this to help you better understand the underlying trend. 1st, the 2nd quarter is our first fully comparable quarter with rag & bone, so we will no longer benefit from acquisition growth as we did in Q1, just from their organic growth. Second, that Q2 revenue growth range includes roughly one point of tailwind from currencies. In constant currency, think of that in very round numbers as up 2% to 4%.

That growth aligns with the 3% core constant currency growth rate that we just achieved in the first quarter. As we move into the 2nd half of this year, as we said on our last call, we do expect to see some improvement in retail trends as we benefit from the portfolio of marketing and retail productivity initiatives that Carlos described. We expect adjusted Q2 operating margin between 2.5%-3.3%, and adjusted earnings per share between $0.11-$0.21. The lower operating margin versus last year is split roughly evenly between a higher occupancy rate and a higher SG&A rate, largely due to the comp declines in our retail businesses. For the full year, we still expect free cash flow of roughly $55 million, including $65 million of CapEx. We are planning the changes in the earnings outlook to be offset by a tightening of working capital.

With that, I'll conclude our prepared remarks and open the call up to your questions. Operator?

Operator (participant)

That's a reminder to ask a question. Simply press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To remove yourself, press star 11 again. One moment while we compile the Q&A roster. That is Star 11 to get in the queue. One moment for our first question, please. It comes from Mauricio Serna with UBS. Please proceed.

Mauricio Serna (Executive Director)

Great. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you are thinking about the rag & bone brand's organic growth expectations for the year. Then maybe on the Americas retail business, you said that one came ahead of your expectations in Q1.

How are you thinking about that business trajectory as the year progresses and your initiatives kind of start materializing into, hopefully, better performance? Thank you.

Carlos Alberini (CEO)

Thank you, Mauricio. Good afternoon, and appreciate your questions. Let me start with rag & bone. We have been very pleased with this business and with the acquisition and with everything that it is bringing to the Guess? business and our portfolio. We had a very good first quarter, and this was on top of a year or the 10 months that we owned the business, where we exceeded our expectations. We had, I think, very high expectations for this year coming in, and we were able to really do better than that in the 1st quarter. The great thing is that most of the performances that were better than expected were across the different channels.

We had a great wholesale business in the 1st quarter. The business shipped a lot more than what we had anticipated, and it came from multiple accounts. In addition to that, our direct-to-consumer business was also strong, both in stores and on e-commerce, where we saw some pretty significant increases over the prior year. We have a big plan for this year. We're talking about $320 million plus. That is, just to give you a point of reference here, before we acquired the company, the business did $250 million on an annualized basis. To go from $250 million-$320 million is a pretty significant increase. Of course, some of this is driven by the addition of new stores. We currently have 41 stores. When we acquired the company, we had 38. We have an expectation to open over 10 stores in the next few months.

A lot of that growth is going to come from that. In addition to that, we are seeing same-store sales growth in addition to the organic growth of our wholesale business. We are adding new markets. We are trying to expand the presence of the brand into the European markets. We opened one store, and we have two more to open in the next few months in Germany. The one that we opened is in Amsterdam. We are also trying to develop other markets worldwide. The brand is already represented in Korea, and there are a few other markets where we have a presence, and we think that the brand can really be very aligned with what customers are looking for in those new markets. Then you have the additional product categories, which are represented by both internal development.

The team is working on new categories, new products, and the products look amazing. We can see that our customers at wholesale are very, very excited about growing their business with us. In addition to that, we are adding licensed products to the assortment. We did a deal in handbags that Paul drove with our licensee that has been our partner for many, many years. The bags are already in the stores and doing very well. We are very excited with that. There are some other deals that are being worked on as we speak, including fragrances. We have a couple of deals already done with watches and eyewear and more to come. Overall, just the team is doing a phenomenal job under the leadership of Andrew Rosen. We could not be more pleased that he is with us and driving a great business.

They are doing a lot of great things on product to really expand certain product categories that have been very successful, including denim. We have a very unique product called Miramar that has been just phenomenal for us. They have been strengthening the team, which is another big thing to really drive the business to a completely new level. We have a new Chief Marketing Officer that is starting very soon, and we have a new head of human resources and several others. We continue to look for just ways to strengthen our talent there. Very excited about everything that is going on. We have changed some of the business models, including outlet, for example. Outlet used to run the stores with excess product from the other channels. Now we have created an entirely new business model where we are making product for those stores.

We have opened several stores just to expand our outlet distribution. Very excited, and the business is on fire there. Your second question, Mauricio, is about Americas retail. I am very excited about this. Definitely, we continue to see some weakness in traffic, and that traffic is impacting our ability to really turn around the business. We are seeing a lot of great moves here with the changes that we have made, starting with product. I think we shared with you in the last call that we were going after more casual assortment and trying to really bring a lot more denim into the product selection that we had in those stores and bringing more casual and less dressy type of product.

Also, we are addressing pricing there and trying to cover many of the opening price points that we had not had enough of an assortment or an offering. We are doing a lot in terms of allocating the product where it belongs, depending on the characteristics of the stores that we are trying to serve. We have done more in the whole retail process, addressing people and addressing visual merchandising to do a better job. We are seeing that for the first time in a long time, that many days we are seeing positive comps in the stores, which is very exciting. Of course, we only have 60 stores in that chain. I'm talking about the full-price freestanding stores. Sorry?

Mauricio Serna (Executive Director)

Yeah, no, just the full price. That's what you were saying, right?

Carlos Alberini (CEO)

Yeah, yeah, full-price stores.

As part of this, we are seeing, for example, in the 1st quarter, that women's apparel was positive at +3%. We have not seen this in a very long time. Our business now is primarily focused on women. We think that the customer represents about 85% of the total customer base. Of course, if we turn women's, that is a major, major sign of success for us. We are excited. We are seeing conversion up about 6% in spite of the traffic being down about 11%. That traffic trend is better than what we saw in the fourth quarter. We are seeing AUR up. We are seeing ADS up. All this is converting into a much better bottom line relative to what we were expecting.

This has been one of the major reasons why we had a better first quarter than what we had expected. We expect just our outlook today does not include a significant change from the current trends. Between us, I think that that could happen. It could happen that we continue to see improvements and that could turn from the trends that we are experiencing now. This could include our other part of the business, which is more the factory outlet business, which is a much bigger business for us now here in North America than the full-price stores. We have seen improved conversion in that business as well. We are addressing pricing. I think we mentioned this in the past, that we thought that in some cases we had opportunities to recapture customer share by addressing prices.

We are being more promotional, but we were able to absorb that with an increased IMU during the period. We feel good about how we are positioned with that business as well. I will stop there. I do not know if you have a follow-up question, Mauricio.

Mauricio Serna (Executive Director)

No, this is very encouraging and super helpful to hear. I guess just a quick follow-up. As you are thinking about the 2nd half of the year and maybe thinking about the ranges of your operating margin outlook, how are you thinking about second half potentially being able to have a little bit of modest margin expansion or maybe flattish margins on a year-over-year basis on the 2nd half, not full year?

Carlos Alberini (CEO)

Dennis?

Dennis Secor (Interim CFO)

Yeah, let me take that. I think I would start first. I think the way to understand this year is really to first understand the top line.

As always, our model has a lot of moving parts. If you start with the top line, the shape of this year's growth curve is really an inverted bell curve. We start high, then we moderate a bit in the middle two quarters, still positive, and then up again in the fourth quarter. You start with the quarter we just completed, 9.4%. That is buoyed by the extra two months that we get from rag & bone. Some earlier shipments a bit in wholesale. As we said, the core Guess? business grew at three points. That is an important data point to keep in mind. Within that 1st quarter, we are also flying into about a two-and-a-half-point headwind on currencies. As you move into the 2nd quarter, we just guided to that using, again, very round numbers, about 3-5% top-line growth.

Now with a one-point tailwind, that's the 2%-4% we talked about, which compares to that 3% core organic growth that we talked about. 3rd quarter looks pretty similar to that. It's mostly the organic growth at work. There's always a little bit of noise from wholesale shipments. We start to see some modest improvements in the retail business based on the initiatives that we've got going. Again, that's generally the dynamic of those middle quarters. When you get to the 4th quarter, based on what we know right now, we see a significant change, mostly due to currencies. We expect the fourth quarter to be up in the high single to approaching 10% range. It's an important quarter for us. It's the biggest quarter for us in the year. That organic growth is still working.

We're starting to see, as Carlos alluded to, those retail improvements that we talked about. In Q4, currency becomes a five-point tailwind based on where it is right now. One data point for you, the euro now today was over 1.14. It was 1.05 on average last Q4. That's almost a 9% growth. From the first quarter to the fourth quarter, about an eight-point swing. For the full year, we guided to 5.5%-7.5% round numbers. Organic growth of Guess? is in there at about three points. The extra two months of rag & bone gives us about two points of growth in currencies based on where they are right now, another two points of growth.

Carlos Alberini (CEO)

If you look at that, and then from an operating margin perspective, the 1st three quarters generally relative to last year are still in that same range of we expect to see some compression of our operating margins. When we get to the 4th quarter, that's the opportunity with that currency tailwind there, some better performance in the retail businesses. We start to leverage our fixed cost base. I hope that gives you some insight into how we see the year progressing.

Mauricio Serna (Executive Director)

Yeah, very, very helpful. Thank you so much. And best of luck. Thank you.

Dennis Secor (Interim CFO)

Thanks.

Carlos Alberini (CEO)

Thank you, Mauricio.

Operator (participant)

Thank you so much. As a reminder, if you do have a question, simply press star 11 to get.

Hello.

Carlos Alberini (CEO)

Is that Eric?

The line's going correctly here.

Yeah. Hey, hi. How are you?

Good, Eric.

Two things.

Go ahead.

Okay.

Thank you for the color on this. A lot of pieces here. When you look at how should we be thinking about inventories? I know that this quarter was unusual. How are you going to kind of look at the rest of the year in terms of flowing inventories based upon tariffs and the rest of the world here?

Hi, Eric. I'll start, and then I'm sure that Dennis will finish. Just our inventories are up about 15% in dollars and about 14% in constant currency. These numbers are a little bit higher than what we had anticipated. Everything that drove these numbers has been intentional. We have been watching the whole supply chain challenges, especially all the inventory that is coming into Europe from Asian countries.

With the Red Sea crisis, this has been a significant challenge to make sure that inventory or product was available to support both our wholesale business and also our own retail direct-to-consumer businesses. We have been very aggressive in bringing product early, even if that represented a need for an additional investment. We are happy we did because having access to all that product enabled us to really ship product early. Because the product is selling well and our retail customers are very happy with our relationship, they want to take that product early. This happened in both in Europe, but it also happened here in North America. I mean, we will continue to really make sure that we can support our business for sure. Of course, over the long term, we expect to really run the business with a more streamlined inventory ownership.

We are now comparing apples and apples, meaning just now we have anniversary the acquisition of rag & bone. So the 15% is a true 15% increase in inventory. We think that over time, we could take just a lot of that increase out of the model. I mean, we do not anticipate that we will be able to close the year with a number that is significantly different than that. Of course, we are trying to work in such a way that we protect the business, but also we run with a streamlined efficient model. If we see opportunities to reduce inventory levels, we will try to do so even this year. Over the medium term, especially if the supply chain issues within transit times get normalized, we would fully expect to really get a reduction in inventory ownership.

Dennis Secor (Interim CFO)

Yeah, just I would add to that. We are focused, Eric, on driving improvements to our cash flows. In Carlos' prepared remarks, he talked a lot about profit initiatives and growth initiatives. Those obviously are designed to improve cash flows. Working capital is another area we have made the investments. I would size that investment somewhere in the order of $50 million. That has been very important to protect the business. We believe, and we have heard from our accounts, that we are rewarded in gaining share because we have been so reliable on delivering products. Once the Red Sea crisis wanes and it is a more normal environment, we expect to be able to reclaim that cash once again.

Okay. Could we get an update on Guess jeans, please? Thank you.

Carlos Alberini (CEO)

Guess jeans. We are very pleased with the development of Guess jeans.

We have a very nice distribution, especially in Europe. The business is primarily a wholesale business now. We have been able to deliver a few seasons now, and we continue to exceed our expectations, not by a huge amount, but we are doing better than what we had anticipated. There is a lot of work that is being done by the teams here to really improve our product offering. They have been very, very much in a listening mode, working with the different accounts just to understand whether we have everything that they want or they need more. We have been developing more product based on that, both for men and women. We are trying to understand just where the customer is gravitating and try to strengthen the offering based on that.

We think that we are in a very good place in terms of the type of trends that are in the marketplace and how we are addressing them with our products. I think the product line looks great. We think that the pricing model that we are following is also pretty much in line with what it needs to be. We have several accounts in North America. We wish that the North America business was bigger by now, but we think that at the end of the day, it's like in every one of our businesses, product will win. We are also excited about our marketing initiatives because we think that what we are talking about and doing as it relates to social media is also going to impact a brand like Guess jeans that appeals to a much younger consumer that lives with social media.

We are excited about that as well. We are trying to really make sure that all those new practices that we are trying to implement as it relates to marketing have into consideration the Guess jeans needs, including influencers, including the whole idea of collaborations and things that we can do to really expand the distribution and the awareness. We are excited about the new stores. We have now three stores open in Europe, and we are planning to open Melrose here in Los Angeles. We are planning to open Tokyo in a few months. We have a lot going on to really put the brand out there. Every time that we do one of these events, we get significant participation and a lot of excitement from that younger consumer. We think that this is just the beginning of a great opportunity.

Great.

Thank you. Good luck for the rest of the year.

Thank you, Eric. Operator. All right. Just in closing, I want to thank you all for participating today. We are very pleased with the start of our year. We are encouraged by the early results of our initiatives regarding product, marketing, and retail productivity in both North America and in Europe. We believe that these successes can be leveraged across the rest of our direct-to-consumer business, especially in the second half of the year as Dennis was just alluding to. We are excited. We have a big plan for the second half, but we think that we have opportunities to meet and exceed those plans. We have a strong opportunity with our direct-to-consumer business, but also in our wholesale business. Our trends are very strong.

We are excited and ready to drive the business and gain market share, leveraging the strong inventory position that we have built. We look forward to reporting back to you on our progress, and we wish you a great day. Thank you so much.